Scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider say they just temporarily created the hottest man-made temperature by colliding two lead ions.

According to a source working on the project, the collision sprung loose a plasma "soup" of sub-atomic gluons and quarks at an estimated temperature of 5.5-trillion-degrees Celsius. We won't know just how hot the plasma was for at least a few weeks because the measurements are very delicate and have to be converted to degrees. The consensus seems to be that it will shatter the previous record, which was about 4 trillion degrees.

The craziest thing is that this might not even be the hottest temperature ever. Scientists at Brookhaven Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are still trying to figure out how hot a similar plasma they created last month is.

So let's review: two sub-atomic particle labs on opposite sides of the Atlantic both potentially broke a record for an obscenely hot temperature. It's a temperature so hot and so temporary, that they can't even measure it in degrees. No matter who holds the record, people win because science is awesome. [Nature and RHIC]

They call this a “quark-gluon plasma”, which I love to say ... “quark-gluon plasma”, that is. I remember years ago they used to talk about the “temperature of hell” as being the theoretically maximum possible temperature, because any attempt to make it hotter would just cause more particles to be created, which subtracts from the kinetic energy, thus cooling it.

The quark-gluon plasma is in this realm. They make graphs of the “chemical potential” ( a misnomer surely! ) of the quarks and gluons, which is a quantitative way of dealing with the “maximum temperature” idea.

Boltzman's constant is k = 8.617 3324 x 10-5 eV K-1, and each lead ion has energy 287 TeV, corresponding to T = 3,300,000 trillion degrees. But this is not a temperature, just an energy divided by k. The temperature of the quark gluon plasma created by the collision is about one millionth of that.

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